BD 

555 



The Art 



*rs- 



Where Knowledge Fails 



rn< 




Class _:BiL££Sl 

Book.— J3iL. 

Copyright N° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Art of Life Series 



THE ART OF LIFE SERIES 
Edward Howard Griggs, Editor 



Where Knowledge Fails 



BY 

EARL BARNES 

p 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
BY THE EDITOR 



NEW YORK 

B. W. HUEBSCH 

1907 






!1 



LiBBARY of C0N6KE8SJ 
v*D Oopies fteceiv 

DEC 5 1907 
fv Ctopyrigru tmy 

CUSS &* JUU. Wo. 
tOFY ^T/ 



^ 




>3, 



Copyright, 1907, by 
B. W. HUEBSCH 



<■? 



I 



Where Knowledge Fails 



Introduction by the Editor 

It is the aim of this series to bring to- 
gether chapters of vital thinking on the 
immediate problems men and women 
must face in the supreme art of living. 
The basal one of these, upon which all 
others rest, is the problem of faith or 
religion. What one ultimately believes 
and feels about one's relation to the 
universe finds expression in every deed. 
Thus faith is the base-line on which 
is erected the superstructure of conduct. 
It would be comforting if we could 
solve all the great enigmas and rest 
quietly on a finished theory of the 
universe, but such certainty is not neces- 
sary to noble living. Indeed, it may 
even be questioned whether it would 
be morally to our advantage to prove 
all we would like to prove. To stand 

7 



8 Introduction by the ILditor 

erect in a world of which one knows 
little, and dare to live as if the best 
were true, does something to the human 
spirit. To face darkness all round about 
and live as if there were light, calls out 
a moral heroism of character which sel- 
dom appears in the self-satisfied dogma- 
tist who has a finished answer for every 
question. Our moral need is not to prove 
what we would like to prove, but to 
know what we can dare to believe and 
build our lives upon. Can I dare to live 
as if I were " the grass of the field, which 
to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the 
oven," or as if each act of my life had 
infinite meaning? Can I dare to live as 
if the universe rested back upon intelli- 
gent and loving mind, or as if it were the 
merest " fortuitous concurrence of invisi- 
ble atoms ? " It is such questions that 
press for immediate answer, and that are 
answered practically in the conduct of 
every man. 

It is these questions that are boldly 



Introduction by the Editor 9 

considered in the book that follows. 
Trained in the science that, after shaking 
the structure of older beliefs, tended in 
certain of its votaries to set up a more 
limited dogmatism of its own, yet broad- 
ly experienced in the great and deep 
realities of human life, the author has 
ventured to open his heart and confess 
frankly how the world on the whole 
looks to a reverent child of our intellec- 
tual period, and what such an one dares 
to lay down as the basis in belief of his 
own action and life. While bravely per- 
sonal, as all statement of faith must be, 
the author's thinking is conceived in such 
broad relation to the general movement 
of the intellect and the constant need of 
the human spirit that it should not only 
serve as a tonic challenge to other minds 
facing the same problem, but help to 
clear the atmosphere in these intellectu- 
ally confused days. 

Edward Howard Griggs. 



Where Knowledge Fails 

It was about 1870, a decade after Dar- 
win and Wallace had formulated their 
theory of natural selection, that Science, 
last born of theologies, became a domi- 
nating influence in the lives of the com- 
mon people. With what joy we looked 
forward to the emancipation of the hu- 
man spirit which Science was to bring. 
Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and their dis- 
ciples were to lead us into the promised 
land of gladness and it was to be ours. 
We were to become as sons of God, 
knowing all things; and with knowledge 
were to come peace and happiness. 

We have now had nearly forty years 
in which to develop the worship of exact 
knowledge and in which to assimilate 
its teachings and work them into the 

structure of our lives. Science has 

11 



12 Where Knowledge Fails 

become established, with its priests, its 
dogmas, its ceremonials, its heretics, its 
Index Expurgatorius and its excommuni- 
cations. Every one of us, whether he 
will or no, now thinks in terms of the 
scientific hypotheses of the seventies. 

And yet, to-day, in the world of Chris- 
tendom men are not glad. Instead, we 
live in the midst of a very universal sad- 
ness of spirit. In philosophy our leaders 
are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who 
offer us only despair. In politics, such 
inspiration as we find is in books like 
Masterman's " In Peril of Change," or 
Hobhouse's " Democracy and Reac- 
tion "; and these books are written over 
on every page with anxious questioning 
and uncertainty. The drama born out 
of our philosophy is the drama of Mr. 
Bernard Shaw, in which we watch women 
pursuing men across the stage, driven by 
Schopenhauer's fierce will to live. The 
poetry which is most representative of 
the present time is still the poetry of 



Where Knowledge Fails 13 

Kipling with its songs of killing and 
compelling. 

It is the very completeness of the suc- 
cess achieved by science which is in large 
part responsible for this failure to bring 
us happiness. Long ago Thoreau pointed 
out that many a man who sets out to 
build himself a house of gladness finds 
that he has, instead, built a workhouse 
and sentenced himself to it for life. It 
is the same in the world of the mind. 
Driven by ambition and by the desire to 
know, men build up for themselves a 
system of knowledge, only to find that 
they have built a wall about their 
thoughts inside of which they must for- 
ever wander. 

Twenty years ago I spent long days in 
the British Museum gathering material 
to illustrate the thesis that whenever the 
church has interfered with the freedom 
of thought, it has been bad for the 
church and bad for humanity as a whole. 
As I sat at the table week after week, 



14 Where Knowledge Fails 

searching out instances to illustrate the 
struggle which philosophers, mathema- 
ticians, astronomers, geologists and biol- 
ogists have waged to set free the spirit 
of man, I became increasingly conscious 
of the fact that the thesis was far too 
narrow. 

It is not the church alone which has 
been inhospitable to new ideas. There 
was no welcome in the European uni- 
versities for the new humanism which 
came in at the close of the Middle Ages. 
The ideas of Darwin and Wallace were 
not received with acclamation in Ameri- 
can seats of learning. Harvey's discov- 
ery of the circulation of the blood was 
as fiercely opposed by physicians as it 
was by churchmen. Modern psychology 
has had as many enemies among physi- 
ologists as among preachers. And so 
the thesis should read: Whenever any 
one, churchman or layman, establishes a 
philosophy or a body of knowledge which 
he looks upon as complete, no matter if 



Where Knowledge Fails 15 

he be Roman Catholic, natural or Chris- 
tian Scientist, Methodist, or Rationalist, 
it is bad for that individual and bad for 
humanity as a whole. The reason for 
this is clear and simple. We are in proc- 
ess of becoming. We are only a little 
way on the road toward knowledge, let 
alone the final goal of wisdom, and we 
have cause to be profoundly suspicious 
of our powers. 

It is the recognition of this limitation 
of our powers which marks the difference 
between our modern modes of thinking 
and those that lie behind us. With the 
philosophers of the ancient world the 
fundamental questions were: What is 
God ? What is nature ? What is man ? 
How did these powers of the universe 
originate? How are they inter-related? 
What is to be their final end ? But since 
the time of Immanuel Kant few intelli- 
gent men have been found bold enough to 
raise these questions. " What is the ori- 
gin, extent and validity of human knowl- 



1 6 Where Knowledge Fails 

edge?" he inquired; and since his day 
we have been steadily seeking the answer. 
We can hardly overestimate or overstate 
the difference in these fundamental points 
of view between the ancient and the mod- 
ern world. The men of the earlier daysi 
believed that their minds were capable 
of understanding any of the problems of 
the universe. To-day, we are content to 
make a beginning by inquiring into the 
nature and power of the instruments 
which we must use in our processes of 
understanding. 

And in the past hundred years we have 
made some progress in estimating these 
powers and in tracing their limitations. 
Something in the nature of an answer we 
have found, and it has come out most 
clearly as we have looked back along the 
path of our slow and painful ascent. For 
it seems to be true that through long ages 
of struggle man has been climbing up 
from the lowest animal and vegetable 
forms, retaining and carrying with him 



Where Knowledge Fails ij 

the powers and qualities of the lower 
forms and adding to them new powers 
and new capacities. And what have we 
now achieved? 

On the side of our special senses, we 
seem to have started as unicellular or- 
ganisms, which felt heat and cold and 
pain over their whole periphery. Gradu- 
ally, some parts of these organisms be- 
came fitted to feel vibrations of light 
and slowly eyes appeared; other parts 
became specially sensitive to sound and 
ears became a permanent heritage of the 
generations. At present, we men, who 
believe ourselves the highest of created 
animals, have some half dozen special 
senses and what seem to be the begin- 
nings of many others. Even our best 
senses, however, like sight and hearing, 
are able to report on only very narrow 
zones of phenomena. When vibrations 
in the air are too slow I cannot hear 
them; when they are too fast I cannot 
feel them. Only a little band of the 



1 8 Where Knowledge Fails 

sounds of the world can reach me 
through my partially developed hearing; 
and the same is true of my other senses. 

" I know there are sounds that I cannot 
hear, 
And sights that I cannot see ; 
I know the world has many a door 
Of which I have not the key. 1 



11 



Meantime our improved sciences are 
showing us that the world is full of sub- 
the forces as strange and significant as 
light and sound, which I have no special 
senses to apprehend — such forces as elec- 
tricity or those connected with radium. 
Who can say what power of interpreting 
existence these forces may yet bring to 
man. We can imagine what it may be 
like by thinking how it would be with a 
race of men born blind. They might dis- 
cover traces of the force which we call 
light through its effect on plants or upon 
themselves; but how immensely the uni- 
verse would broaden when developing 



Where Knowledge Fails 19 

eyes flooded the soul with light-messages 
from all the objects of this world and its 
neighboring planets ! Something of this 
sort may happen to our descendants, if 
we have been right in this analysis of the 
origin of our senses. With special senses 
for electricity, or for *-rays, they may 
find all existence illuminated with new 
significance. These forces seem much 
more widely dispersed than sound, possi- 
bly as widely as light itself. What may 
they not tell to future generations if spe- 
cial senses or equivalent inventions bring 
their messages to the waiting souls of 
men. 

And meantime, the great body of or- 
ganic sensibility, which masses itself to- 
gether at the base of my being and still 
remains comparatively undifferentiated, 
gives me much of the most valuable 
knowledge I have. As I walk in the 
summer fields it enables me to say: " I 
am content," " I feel well," " I am ill," 
"I am glad," "I despair"; and I feel 



r-^ ■ ■•* -' • i. 

20 Where Knowledge Fails 

these conditions through my whole sys- 
tem. It is this composite group of sensi- 
bilities, this tangled mass of feeling, on 
which we mainly build our understand- 
ing of ourselves or of other personalities. 
The special senses, especially sight and 
hearing, give us most of the data which 
we use in the exact sciences. But this 
undifferentiated sensibility gives us the 
material for poetry, romance and reli- 
gion. 

The special senses are the new and 
upstart servants of the soul, and they 
take to themselves the airs and pretension 
of the newly rich. These other undiffer- 
entiated masses of mingled feelings are 
the older servitors of life. Their liver- 
ies are less impressive and their titles less 
sounding, but they are instinct with all 
the traditions of life and with the obli- 
gations of long service. What I feel 
as I sit with closed eyes in my garden 
may be truer and more significant than 
what I see when I open my eyes. 



Where Knowledge Fails 21 

On the side of my senses then, I may 
be as humble or as proud as my mood 
demands. On the side of actual achieve- 
ment I touch the world at few points 
and with uncertain significance; but in 
my potentiality I can justify my pride, 
for I seem embarked on an endless voy- 
age of conquest. Looking at a low-grade 
form of life, such as an oyster, I can 
exclaim: How wonderful I am! The 
oyster, hidden away in the sea, and with 
undeveloped powers, feels only the slight- 
est touch of the world. I feel the play 
of a thousand mysteries coming to me 
out of the universe that surrounds me. 
But it is perfectly thinkable that there 
may be an intelligence which reaches and 
feels a world as much greater than mine 
as mine is greater than that of the oyster. 
And it is into this world of larger intelli- 
gence that my children's children may 
emerge in time. To-day, I am but at 
the threshold of knowledge, so far as 
sense impressions are concerned. 



22 Where Knowledge Fails 

What now can we say as to the origin, 
extent and validity of our processes of 
thinking? Somewhere on the line of my 
ascent I seem to have begun recording in 
my mind images of my sensations. These 
were later elaborated into more complete 
images or concepts and these in turn I 
can now arrange in various related series. 
Of the final truth of any of these series 
I am most uncertain. Their value must 
of course be determined by the value of 
the sense content I put into them and we 
have seen how weak and variable- that 
often is. The element of truth in any 
deductive reasoning can never rise above 
the value of the major premise employed, 
and no amount of reasoning can produce 
a major premise; that must come from 
sense impressions. Even the inductions 
of which we are so proud to-day all rest 
in the same uncertain foundations of 
sense. 

But there is another element of un- 
certainty and of possible error in all 



Where Knowledge Fails 23 

reasoning. The mind is so organized 
that it must move in certain ways. It 
must think in certain fixed relations, such 
as those of time and space and cause and 
effect. Are these conditions, which regu- 
late and possibly limit the action of mind, 
also existent in the external world? No 
one can tell. In many of the operations 
of pure mathematics or of logic the sense 
content is so slight or non-existent that 
I should feel very sure of the finality of 
my conclusions if I knew that the cate- 
gories of relation were themselves eternal 
attributes of all existence — but I do not 
know. 

If a machine for making matches were 
possessed of consciousness it might say: 
A careful examination of my invariable 
product shows me that this universe is 
composed entirely of matches, which 
come to me in the form of blocks of 
wood, sulphur and phosphorus. May 
not a man likewise say: Examining the 
invariable product of my mind I find 



24 Where Knowledge Fails 

the universe is made up of phenomena, 
limited by time and space, related by 
causation, and coming to me as sense im- 
pressions ? 

On the side of thinking, then, I am 
even weaker than on the side of sense. I 
have some power of comparison and gen- 
eralization; I can put together ideas in 
sequences; I can reason to an extent, but 
to how small an extent! So small that 
nearly every fundamental question is 
still unanswerable. 

This weakness of our thinking power 
is pathetically expressed in the life of 
Herbert Spencer. Probably no man has 
ever lived who expected more from ra- 
tional activity than he did ; and at the end 
of a remarkably successful life he gath- 
ered up the results of his experience in 
two big volumes of autobiography. It 
seems to me that the closing words of 
this autobiography, written in the ripest 
years of a great thinker's life, are among 
the most disheartening words ever writ- 



Where Knowledge Fails 25 

ten by man. " We find, indeed," he 
says, " an unreflective mood general 
among both cultured and uncultured, 
characterized by indifference to every- 
thing beyond material interests and the 
superficial aspects of things. There are 
many millions of people who daily see 
sunrise and sunset without ever asking 
what the sun is. There are the univer- 
sity men, interested in linguistic criticism 
to whom inquiries concerning the origin 
and nature of living things seem trivial. 
And even among men of science there 
are those who, curiously examining the 
spectra of nebulae or calculating the 
masses and motions of double-stars, never 
pause to contemplate under other than 
physical aspects the immeasurably vast 
facts they record. But in both cultured 
and uncultured there occur lucid inter- 
vals. Some, at least, either fill the 
vacuum by stereotyped answers, or be- 
come conscious of unanswered questions 
of transcendent moment. 



26 Where Knowledge Fails 

" By those who know much, more 
than by those who know little, is there 
felt the need for explanation. . . . 
Whence this process, inconceivable, how- 
ever symbolized, by which alike the 
monad and the man build themselves up 
into their respective structures? What 
must we say of the life, minute, multitu- 
dinous, degraded, which covering the 
ocean floor, occupies by far the larger 
part of the earth's area; and which yet, 
growing and decaying in utter darkness, 
presents hundreds of species of a single 
type ? Or, when we think of the myriads 
of years of the earth's past, during which 
have arisen and passed away low forms 
of creatures, small and great, which, 
murdering and being murdered, have 
gradually evolved, how shall we answer 
the question — To what end? " 

And this man who has considered this 
question through a long and intellectually 
brilliant life, concludes the whole matter: 
" Behind these mysteries lies the all- 



Where Knowledge Fails 27 

embracing mystery — whence this univer- 
sal transformation which has gone on 
unceasingly throughout a past eternity 
and will go on unceasingly throughout 
a future eternity? And along with this 
rises the paralyzing thought — what if, of 
all that is thus incomprehensible to us 
there exists no comprehension anywhere ? 
No wonder that men take refuge in au- 
thoritative dogma." 

Nowhere can you find in the expe- 
rience of the race a more absolute state- 
ment of the inability of the human mind 
to achieve that final knowledge which 
the human soul so deeply desires ; and we 
feel the same thing in the world of prac- 
tical life. Not long since, two events 
shocked the civilized world. One was 
big and the other seemed small, since it 
involved but one man's life, but each 
expressed the utter weakness of man to 
anticipate or to control his conditions. 
In the one case, a great city was swept 
away; hundreds of people died; thou- 



28 Where Knowledge Fails 

sands were left homeless. Helplessly 
they ran hither and thither on a shaking 
earth ringed round with fire. At the 
same time a man in Paris, who had done 
more than any other man to develop our 
knowledge of the most subtle forces 
known in the world of physics — forces 
so difficult that they can be investigated 
only at the risk of health and life — while 
crossing a street was run over by a 
loaded dray and killed. Man still re- 
mains the creature of seemingly blind 
forces before which he is powerless— so 
powerless that he appears utterly insig- 
nificant. 

As Spencer says, for most of us prac- 
tical men and women the ultimate ques- 
tions of life come rarely to consciousness. 
We take it for granted that the external 
world of phenomena speaks to us through 
our senses, and that our senses are ade- 
quate to grasp all that nature can say. 
We believe ourselves personalities pos- 
sessing minds which recognize these real 



Where Knowledge Fails 29 

objects, among which we move, and capa- 
ble of reducing them to logical order. 
And yet the fact remains that we know 
little of our own natures, little of the 
world around us, little of our relations 
to what we consider the eternal verities 
of time, space and causation. 

We realize how helpless we are when 
we try to solve these ultimate problems. 
Take, for instance, what seems to be the 
most central fact of our consciousness. 
Have I a central ego, a self, which sitting 
above all sensibility, understands, hopes, 
longs, fears and chooses? After apply- 
ing his criterion of doubt to all human 
knowledge, Descartes found that the only 
thing he could not doubt was his own 
doubt. But doubting implies a doubter, 
and so the very fact that I doubt proves 
that I am. Such a logical proof is not, 
however, conclusive to most of us. We 
feel so sure of our central self that we 
imagine we can apprehend it by imme- 
diate experience. Still, when we begin 



30 Where Knowledge Fails 

the process, the self eludes us. We can 
find sensations and then more sensations, 
until like Hume, we are driven to declare 
that the stream of consciousness is all that 
exists. Professor William James, in one 
of the chapters of his great work on 
psychology, makes the same inquiry. At 
the end he is forced to declare that no- 
where can he find, by the methods of 
natural history, such a central self, dis- 
tinct from the stream of consciousness 
that flows through him. 

If we turn from this central problem 
of our own personality to the existence 
of objects in the external world, the mat- 
ter is equally elusive and unanswerable. 
Are there things outside myself that 
would exist were I not here to perceive 
them ? Kant struggled with this problem 
for twenty years and decided that he 
could not know. Phenomena alone he 
could know ; the noumena forever eluded 
him. He was forced to feel, and think 
and act as though there were outside him- 



Where Knowledge Fails 31 

self these different existences and yet he 
recognized that because of the limitations 
of his mind he could never know them. 
The question is one of eternal interest to 
all intelligent minds; but whether there 
are behind the sounds, tastes, colors and 
touch impressions, which I know, real 
trees and buildings, no one can ever be 
certain. No wonder that thousands of 
men and women are drawn to Christian 
Science, or to other interpretations of 
Berkeley's philosophy, as a refuge from 
their inability to know objectivity. They 
recognize the fact that, after all, a man's 
essential life is within him; and that 
the external manifestations of life are 
known to him and can be known to him 
only through his inner interpretations of 
them. 

I cannot know, then, my central self 
nor the world around me, and I equally 
fail when I seek for ultimate origins. 
Whence do we come ? No man has ever 
held his own child in his arms without 



32 Where Knowledge Fails 

feeling what a profound mystery is bound 
up in personality. Whence came this lit- 
tle being with all of his infinitely complex 
possibilities ? His person comprehends a 
life which already, at a few weeks old, 
represents all the possibilities of your life, 
of your mind, and possibly more. Is this 
highest form of the force of the universe 
but the expression of a momentary par- 
ental passion? Is it but the uniting of 
two germinal potentialities? No man, 
looking back over his own life, looking 
back to his own childish beginnings, or 
out into the world of living beings; no 
man who at times listens to the ancestral 
reverberations in his own soul can fail 
to raise the question : What was my life 
before it was my life? It is a strange 
thing that men and women of our race 
should so long have questioned only what 
comes after this brief term of three-score 
years and ten ; the question of what came 
before is quite as imperative. 

And on the other side of these brief 



Where Knowledge Fails 33 

years, which are but a moment, what 
must we expect? What lies beyond this 
term? What will my life be when it 
ceases to be my life? No longer is it 
possible for men and women to think of 
annihilation. The recognition of the 
conservation of energy compels us to be- 
lieve that life must go on in some form. 
What that form is to be is a matter of 
profound moment to me. Socrates says, 
" No evil can befall the good man, 
whether he be alive or dead " ; but even 
if that be a fact, it does not satisfy me. 
And we must all face the great inquiry. 
Wait till death carries away some one we 
love, and we exclaim: " Where is he? 
Where is the companion of my life? 
This friend in whom I have trusted and 
confided and rested, who has carried me 
in his heart these years past, where is he 
now ? What is my relation to him now ? 
Men cannot fail to consider this ques- 
tion, whether they be Christians, agnos- 
tics or infidels. 



34 Where Knowledge Fails 

Or, take a different range of questions: 
What is my relation to the external world 
around me? It is springtime and the 
earth is flooded with sunshine. It is 
glorious with all the evidences of new life 
springing from the older life under and 
around it, and my heart goes out to it 
and I feel that this world is a fitting ex- 
pression of myself. I must go out and 
take possession of it. All our brighter 
talk, the songs we sing from day to day, 
nearly all of poetry and art speaks of my 
relation to this great world. What is 
that relation? The men and women of 
San Francisco are struck down by the 
forces which move nature, and they are 
filled with bewilderment and dread and 
despair. And still the spring morning 
fills my heart with gladness and song. 
Which of us is right? 

To-night the moon will ride in splen- 
dor through the heavens. Is it but a dead 
stone acting as a reflecting mirror to light 
this earth at night? If that be true, then 



Where Knowledge Fails 35 

is our earth itself moving on to the same 
fate? Is it to become in turn a dead 
stone incapable of supporting life? If 
so, where is there any reason for that 
solution of life which pleads for the con- 
tinuous development of superior quali- 
ties? Why develop them if at their best 
they are to be starved and frozen out of 
existence on a barren rock ? What is the 
fundamental truth behind all pantheism? 
Does the ocean, do the stars and the 
hills and the trees and the birds speak 
to my soul? Have I communion with 
life in them, or is it all but an illusion? 

And in all these questions is involved 
the problem of my own use and value. 
What is my personal significance in this 
world? Am I or am I not important? 
In the days before Jesus Christ, the indi- 
vidual was generally not significant ; if in 
Greece or Rome a child was born de- 
formed, he was condemned to death. 
Since the coming of Christ, no thoughtful 
man or woman would accept a theory of 



36 Where Knowledge Fails 

life which proposed to destroy the frail- 
est child. This is because the individual 
has become so deeply significant ; his soul 
is felt to be related to the whole web of 
the universe and all existence would suf- 
fer through his loss, and he would him- 
self suffer some infinite wrong. Christen- 
dom has held this doctrine for almost two 
thousand years, and yet no man can 
prove it. All rational proof turns the 
other way. Reason shows me that I am 
not deeply significant. 

And so I stand in an unknown uni- 
verse, insecure, uncertain, confronting in- 
finite problems of greatest significance to 
my soul, and with a mind incapable of 
solving them. And in my perplexity two 
different lines of escape are offered me by 
my self-appointed leaders. In the one 
solution, I am offered some inspired creed, 
some divinely directed church, and I am 
told to lay the whole responsibility in the 
hands of a priesthood, or to rest in a 
sacred word, and I need ask no questions. 



Where Knowledge Fails 37 

In the second solution, I am told that 
the meaning of life must be found in 
service to others. 

The difficulty with the first solution 
lies again in the major premise. If there 
is no god but Allah, and if Mohammed 
is his prophet, then with the Koran for 
my guide I can dismiss all these ques- 
tions, for there is no place where knowl- 
edge fails. If the descendants of Peter 
hold the keys to eternal happiness, and 
have infallible power, then I can leave 
all these questions behind me at the 
church door. If I have an inspired word 
of final wisdom and the mental capacity, 
with divine assistance, to interpret it for 
myself, then the chapel is as good as the 
church. But to find peace in this solution 
I must be able to accept without question 
the basal claims of chapel, church, 
mosque, synagogue or temple. 

The other possibility of escape from 
my uncertainty and isolation has been 
admirably stated by Mrs. Gilman : 



38 Where Knowledge Fails 

" There is no deeper grief than loneliness, 
Our sharpest anguish at the death of 
friends 
Is loneliness. Our agony of heart 
When love is gone from us is loneli- 
ness. 
The crying of a little child at night 
In the big dark is crowning loneliness. 

When we shall learn 

To live together fully ; when each man 
And woman works in conscious inter- 
change 
With all the world — union as wide as 
man — 
No human soul can suffer more 

The devastating grief of loneliness." 

But this solution is to me absolutely futile. 
Those men and women who have most 
assuredly applied themselves to it have 
been most lonely. Abraham Lincoln car- 
ried a nation's problems and griefs on his 
shoulders through long years, confronted 
by every form of obloquy that can fall 
on public men. Often utterly alone, but 



Where Knowledge Fails 39 

devoted heart and soul to humanity, he 
knew the crowning loneliness of life, 
Jesus in Gethsemane, standing in the 
most vital relations to human service, 
devoted to the rescue of men, knew the 
most terrible loneliness that life can 
bring. It is not through service that we 
shall escape from loneliness, except as 
work is taken as a mental opiate. 

This, then, is the condition in which I 
find myself to-day : Coming from I know 
not whence, driven by the fierce desire to 
live, guided by insistent but blind hun- 
gers, distrustful of the inspired guides 
who claim to possess ultimate knowledge, 
I am forced to rest back on my intelli- 
gence. But my intelligence is limited by 
my instruments of knowledge. On ex- 
amination, my senses prove to be still but 
rudimentary, connecting me at best with 
only a very limited part of the world 
which I believe exists around me. Even 
such faint and imperfect reports as my 
senses give me must be worked up by my 



4-0 Where Knowledge Fails 

reason. This reason cannot go beyond 
the limits of my major premises, and they 
are all determined by my experience. 
Even within the world of experience, such 
is the diversity of life that my reason 
becomes confused and my sequences of 
causes and effects are often repudiated by 
other minds of equal powers with my 
own. Only within narrow fields of ab- 
straction, such as those of mathematics 
and logic, do I feel fairly sure of the 
accuracy of my reason, and this is just 
because it is applied to the world of pure 
concepts, and not to the world which I 
call real. 

Meantime, outside this narrow pad- 
dock, lie all the fields of my desire. If I 
dare to venture over the borders, Science 
sternly warns me back; and if I per- 
sist in my adventurous quest she threat- 
ens me with the opprobrious epithets of 
charlatan or dupe. To-day these words 
rankle and burn as did the shameful 
word heretic in the Middle Ages. And 



Where Knowledge Fails 41 

yet no man ever lived for a single day 
within the little paddock of the surely 
known. The hourly necessities of life 
drive him constantly into short excursions 
over the border; and the guide to whose 
skirts he clings close in these petty jour- 
neyings back and forth is Faith. 

Take, for instance, the affairs of daily 
business life. I sow my field and hope 
for increase, but my only reason for 
thinking it will come is that it has come 
repeatedly in the past. The seed may not 
germinate, drought may burn up my 
crop, floods may wash it away, blight 
may fall upon it or the insects of the air 
may devour it. Before it matures the 
wheels of war chariots may scatter the 
fruits of my vineyard; and I have no 
proof that I shall be here as a living man 
desiring food even when to-morrow's 
sun rises. And yet for thousands of 
years the sons of men have plowed the 
earth and scattered seed in the furrows, 
led by faith to believe that they should 



42 Where Knowledge Fails 

eat of the fruit of their labors. They 
hoped and believed; but they could not 
know. 

In the more involved fields of business 
it is the same. I will buy me a piece of 
land here on the side of the town; I be- 
lieve population will extend this way; 
cars will run past; factories will spring 
up and the value of my land will increase. 
Or, I will fit myself for the profession of 
mechanical engineer. I will study for 
years in the faith that my generation will 
need machines, and that the skill now 
required to produce them will still be 
needed and recompensed in my mature" 
years. I know none of these things, but 
act solely on faith. 

In the whole range of personal rela- 
tions it is the same. I will make this man 
my friend, or that woman my wife, be- 
cause I love them and I believe they are 
true and faithful. They will bring me 
good and not evil all the days of my life. 
But neither my senses nor my reason can 



Where Knowledge Fails 43 

assure me that I shall not be betrayed 
and ruined. Even Jesus had a friend 
named Judas. In all of my personal 
relations, I must act on faith alone. 

And what then is Faith? The Cen- 
tury Dictionary says it is " the assent of 
the mind to the truth of a proposition for 
which there is not complete evidence." 
The Encyclopaedia Britannica says it 
means " the acceptance of something as 
true which is not known to be true." To 
the scientific dogmatist Faith seems to 
describe the great Betrayer of Man. In 
reality it describes our daily companion, 
guide, counselor and friend. Close shut 
within the little paddock of the known, 
our souls would atrophy away as did that 
of Herbert Spencer, or that of the great 
Darwin, if we may trust his own declara- 
tion. Such life as continued in this de- 
voted martyr's soul was due to excursions 
out from the paddock of the known un- 
der the guidance of Faith in disguise as 
Hypothesis. 



44 Where Knowledge Fails 

But if Faith is such a simple, constant 
and indispensable thing why has it come 
to be considered with such distrust by so 
many thoughtful men and women ? It is 
because, like all other good things, it has 
been misused. Ignorant or interested 
people have insisted that not only should 
Faith act as guide outside the field of the 
known, but that even within the field 
where sense and reason can guide us with 
a fair degree of certainty, Faith should 
have unquestioned leadership. Faith, 
they told us, should settle the shape of 
the earth, the origin of species, the evolu- 
tion of languages, the geological stages 
through which the earth has passed, the 
value of historical records. It was used 
to secure perpetuity in institutions, to 
aggrandize individuals and societies until 
finally it became a fetish and was itself 
worshiped. It was used to frighten 
any one into silence who dared to look or 
listen or think for himself. Even works 
became unimportant in its presence. This 



Where Knowledge Fails 45 

is the faith that Voltaire ridiculed, and 
that modern science dreads. But this is 
an artificial thing, having the same rela- 
tion to the faith that saves us that astrol- 
ogy has to astronomy. 

But even the living Faith must not be 
exercised indiscriminately. Like all the 
other operations of the soul it has its 
definite limitations and its laws of proba- 
bility. Its surest ground for belief is 
cumulative experience. In cases where 
repeated observations point in one gen- 
eral direction, and w 7 here the conditions 
remain fixed, I am justified in assuming 
that the next step will be similar in kind 
to those which have preceded it. Day 
has followed night until I may reason- 
ably believe that to-morrow will follow 
to-day. The spaces about the earth have 
grown with our larger powers and every- 
where they are still filled with heavenly 
bodies. The telescope expanded the 
frontiers of the universe and still worlds 
were everywhere; sensitive photography 



46 Where Knowledge Fails 

told of worlds beyond those of the 
telescope, and I have faith that further 
vision will reveal still further worlds. 
Cumulative experience and observation 
drove Columbus to the end of the 
known world and he followed his hy- 
pothesis over seas to other lands. He 
was admiral over his ships, but Faith 
was his master. 

This belief in something not fully 
proved, which rests in cumulative experi- 
ence, is respected and constantly used by 
science. Without its aid her work would 
be complete and all progress would cease. 
Hypothesis is only a shrewd guess; and 
a guess is a tentative act of faith; it is 
belief, more or less intense, in something 
not surely known. In the fields where 
women's reasoning is superior to that of 
men it is largely due to their superior 
guessing power. We say they have intu- 
ition; their minds run ahead of the ob- 
served facts; they jump at a conclusion 
and embrace it with conviction. With 



Where Knowledge Fails 47 

men this power is blunted, possibly be- 
cause they are more constantly involved 
in executive action. The greatest 
dreamer of dreams, the most radical of 
reformers is generally transformed into a 
conservative thinker when he has power 
thrust into his hands. Disraeli, Cham- 
berlain and Burns are but representatives 
of the long line of Radicals who have 
turned Tory when invested with power. 
Our generation is practical; every one 
must act ; and so few believe further than 
they can see. 

But this form of faith, resting on 
cumulative experience, can carry us but 
a little way. It has mole's eyes and sees 
only to the end of its nose. It can an- 
swer none of the ultimate questions which 
we have formulated. It can comfort us 
with probabilities for to-morrow, but it 
can tell us nothing of eternity. For this 
we must have another and more daring 
faith also grounded in experience, but 
covering a much wider area. 



48 Where Knowledge Fails 

This faith which may offer some par- 
tial answer to ultimate questions rests, in 
a last analysis, in the nature of our minds 
and in our human needs. If I am justi- 
fied in believing that the external world 
is limited by temporal, spacial and causal 
relations because my thinking has these 
limits, then I am also justified in believ- 
ing in God and immortality if I cannot 
think without them. It was Voltaire 
who said that if there were no God we 
should have to invent one. There may 
be no universe to fit my modes of think- 
ing and feeling; but beliefs that accord 
with those modes are for me necessary 
and respectable. 

And if one will go further and admit 
that this is a sane and orderly universe 
then there seems increased reason for be- 
lieving in realities that fit the most per- 
sistent longings and beliefs of humanity. 
It is true that this involves a major prem- 
ise which is incapable of proof, but it 
has the warrant of necessity to an extent 



Where Knowledge Fails 49 

far greater than that of any distinctly 
theological premise. I must believe that 
this is a sane universe in order to go on 
living, for why should I will or act at all 
if my being is involved in a disordered 
jumble of accidents. And if I accept a 
belief in the sanity, the orderliness, the 
law abidingness of the universe then it 
must be true that those who reach out 
through their beliefs, and consequent 
practices, along the line of the constitu- 
tion of things will gain an advantage over 
those who move counter to reality. 
Those who feel most truly the funda- 
mental realities of life will survive and 
their children will follow them. Those 
who have erratic and wrong beliefs, and 
consequent wrong conduct, will be elim- 
inated. The wise shall inherit the earth ; 
and in those who have inherited the earth 
I look for a growing wisdom. Hence 
persistent and widespread beliefs have 
a probability in them due to their 
being widely accepted and persistent. As 



50 Where Knowledge Fails 

Lincoln said: " You cannot fool all the 
people all the time." 

If this contention be right then those 
beliefs that are necessary to my mind 
have a strong claim to legitimacy. If 
they have appealed to the majority of 
the people through long periods of time 
then I have the added assurance that 
these beliefs are not due to peculiarities 
of my mind, but that they represent a 
quality of mind in general sufficiently 
strong to survive the sorting influence of 
natural selection. 

Faith that rests in cumulative expe- 
rience takes me then over the frontier of 
knowledge but a little way. This faith 
that rests in the nature of the mind, as 
seen in widespread and persistent belief, 
can help to answer the ultimate questions 
that clamor for answer in all earnest 
natures. Let us examine some of these 
questions under the guidance of this form 
of faith. 

Have I a central norm of selfhood that 



Where Knowledge Fails 51 

persists in the midst of changing states 
of consciousness and that knows and 
wills? We have seen that man's intelli- 
gence cannot discover such an ego, but 
our individual belief in it remains un- 
shaken. From the time of the earliest 
records, with all the races of men, the 
11 1 " has been dominating and impera- 
tive. Even the philosophers, who 
through the efforts of the intelligence 
can distinguish only streams of conscious- 
ness made up of changing states, are 
driven to declare their individual belief 
in a central ego. Descartes, as we saw, 
found his warrant for such a belief in the 
fact that he thought, and thought implied 
a thinker. Hume says that when seated 
in his study he is convinced that he knows 
only a changing stream of consciousness, 
but when he goes out into the fields or 
meets and dines with friends then belief 
in his personal existence and power rises 
triumphant and his previous conclusions 
seem but pale theories of the study table. 



52 Where Knowledge Fails 

Professor William James repeats these 
same experiences. My own experience, 
backed by such widespread and insistent 
belief, gives me warrant for believing in 
my selecting and directing self. I do 
not know what it is like, nor where it 
resides, nor how far it is subject to 
change, nor how far it is free to choose. 
My beliefs about these matters change 
from time to time, but I have still a right 
to believe in myself as the center of my 
known universe. And this belief is pro- 
foundly important, for it must always be 
the center for all other significant beliefs. 
And what else exists besides myself? 
Is there an external world around me 
having something corresponding to the 
objectivity which we generally attribute 
to it? Since the days of Kant we know 
that we cannot pass beyond the phenome- 
non to the noumenon by the processes of 
the mind. From the point of view of 
practical utility, or of morals, an ideal- 
istic philosophy may be as good or even 



Where Knowledge Fails 53 

better than any other, but the general 
feeling and opinion of men demands an 
objective existence and so by simple faith 
I accept it, as Kant did. My belief as to 
the nature of existence will undergo many 
changes with my advancing knowledge. 
Crude masses of inert matter have given 
way to forces, and these are becoming 
increasingly intangible, but there remains 
something which persists independently 
of the perceiving mind. Even the ideal- 
ists, following Berkeley, have to postu- 
late a God in whom inheres or persists 
something which makes for permanence 
in the order and sequence of ideas, and 
this is but another form of objectivity. 

Is there a God in the universe ? I do 
not know. It seems a sane and orderly 
place; even catastrophes which I do not 
fully understand seem capable, with 
larger powers on my part of being under- 
stood. And my mind is so organized 
that to explain such an orderly sequence 
I need some creative and directing mind. 



54 Where Knowledge Fails 

Otherwise it is unthinkable to me. Evo- 
lution but distributes the problem; for 
growth means that the germ has in it all 
that follows. Whence then the germ 
with its potentialities? I need a tran- 
scendent power whether creation be in- 
stantaneous or continuous if I am to 
think about the universe intelligently. 
Most men and women have believed in 
some Supreme Power or Unknown 
Cause or God. They have narrowed 
and circumscribed Him to fit their petty 
modes of thinking, their tribal inter- 
ests or the vested rights of priesthoods. 
But from fetishism, through polytheistic 
nature worship up to our various mono- 
theistic spiritualisms and our negations 
He has moved always in the background 
of men's minds. And so I accept Him 
for the same reason that I accept belief 
in myself or in objective existence. 

What is my setting in time ? How is 
my little space of three-score years and 
ten related backward and forward? 



Where Knowledge Fails 55 

What is my origin, and what is my end? 
Nowhere in my world do I see creations ; 
I cannot think of something struck out 
of nothing, I can no more think of my- 
self as struck into being in response to 
the call of my parent's passion than I can 
think of the creation of a world. I am 
full of old sympathy-memories rever- 
berating out of an infinite past. Great 
numbers of people have felt the same 
difficulty and have postulated some form 
of previous existence from the re-incarna- 
tions of Plato or the Buddhists to the 
theory of continuous germ plasm in mod- 
ern biology. 

As to what comes after death, the 
same reasoning satisfies me. I cannot 
believe in annihilation, and so I believe 
in persistence. The feelings and opinions 
of mankind as a whole sustain me. I 
accept it for the same reason that I be- 
lieve in conservation of energy or in 
objective existence. 

In each of these inquiries is involved 



56 Where Knowledge Fails 

my own personal significance. Am I im- 
portant in a large and eternal way, or 
am I but a grain of sand, a human atom 
too small to count. The selected wisdom 
of the ages declares for my significance. 
Murder has always been the most hide- 
ous of crimes and in the protection of 
one's life all other acts are condoned. 
In the last two thousand years, as we 
have already said, the value of the human 
soul has been lifted to an elevation never 
before attained, and this conception is 
spreading steadily over the world. In 
periods of despotic power tyrants have 
held the lives of their subjects as of 
trifling value ; in times of depression indi- 
viduals have sought death and oblivion ; 
poets and philosophers have sometimes 
declared man petty and his worth infini- 
tesimal; but the great body of feeling 
and belief has insisted that man is signifi- 
cant and of infinite worth. My own 
feelings clamor for this belief and I 
accept it. " It is a little thing, my life, 



Where Knowledge Fails $j 

but it is my life ; which is to say, it is the 
center of everything, the heart of the 
universe." 

We need not multiply the subjects of 
faith. These suffice for illustration; 
they lie outside the field of knowledge; 
I cannot even plead that series of expe- 
riences lead up to and culminate in them ; 
but I believe in them because I need 
them. I seem constructed in that way, 
and the great body of men and women 
has always been constructed in that way. 
If these beliefs are not in consonance 
with the constitution of things in the uni- 
verse then natural selection should have 
eliminated them. 

But it will be asked what I mean by 
God or immortality. I shall be told that 
this statement of belief is too vague for 
human needs; but I deny the charge. I 
am interested only in justifying the be- 
liefs in general. The form and detail 
will change with each morning's sun. 
But so do the beliefs of Science, or any 



58 Where Knowledge Fails 

other theology, change from day to day. 
Even among orthodox believers of any 
sect each person has a different concep- 
tion of God or of immortal life. In fact, 
each person's concepts change constantly 
with his changing experiences of life, just 
as his concept of a friend or of a brother 
changes. I am not concerned with the 
details ; I am pleading only for the right 
of a man to believe what he cannot fully 
know without forfeiting his intellectual 
respectability. 

And meantime we must remember that 
if faith be allowed to gather around it- 
self vested interests, then it will again 
become a tyrant. " Faith is the sense 
and the call of the open horizon." Its 
field of activity must be strictly limited to 
the regions that lie over the border of 
knowledge. Where my senses are ade- 
quate and my reason fairly secure I must 
follow their decisions. I must not appeal 
to faith when I have to earn a living or 
when my child has diphtheria. It must 



Where Knowledge Fails 59 

not determine the geological periods of 
the world's history, or the historical 
worth of a sacred manuscript. All that 
can be known must be known ; and faith 
must never hesitate to make way for 
knowledge. As men develop they will 
know increasingly and knowledge will 
gradually occupy the domains where once 
faith alone could travel. 

And even in its own legitimate fields 
the declarations of faith must be recog- 
nized as different from those of knowl- 
edge. They are but the first faint 
glimpses of something on the horizon 
which may be and probably is land. As 
the ship draws nearer and the sailors 
make out the coast line and the trees, 
these guesses must give way to knowledge 
and faith must move on once more. But 
we need not fear that faith will be 
crowded out of life; the horizon always 
widens and we are but at the beginning 
of the gates of life. 

Meantime Science had best learn mod- 



60 Where Knowledge Fails 

esty. She is not landless, but her estates 
are small and ill-cultivated. She cannot 
occupy the open spaces save by taking 
them over in increments, and there is no 
hope that she can ever reach the horizon. 
Let her then make friends with Faith, 
and if Faith respects her atoms and elec- 
trons and ether and protoplasm, let her 
in turn respect Faith's belief in personal 
significance, in God and in immortality. 



THE 

USE OF THE 

MARGIN 

By EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS 

{In The Art of Life Series) 



^T*HE author's theme is the problem of 
A utilizing the time one has to spend as 
one pleases for the aim of attaining the high- 
est culture of mind and spirit. How to 
work and how to play; how to read and 
how to study, how to avoid intellectual dis- 
sipation and how to apply the open secrets 
of great achievement evidenced in conspicu- 
ous lives are among the many phases of the 
problem which he discusses, earnestly, yet 
with a light touch and not without humor. 

i2mo, cloth, 50 cents, net; 
by mail, - - 55 cents. 



B. W. HUEBSCH 

Publisher ... New York 



DEC 5 H 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



